


Descending Abyss

by vane (Clavain)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Heavy - Freeform, Lesbians, Science Fiction, computer science written by a compsci student, depressing because it was written by a depressed person, gratuitous coding, horrific but not horror, not fanfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 19:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5346041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clavain/pseuds/vane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life of a software developer told in seven parts, each set seven years apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Descending Abyss

**Descending Abyss**

**(i)**

Anancy was tired and the world looked like it was rocking. The motion was an irregular lurch. She felt sick. It bled out at the edges of her vision into something else and the ground swayed. Behind her there was pushing, the crowd demanded forward motion, and she tried to surrender control for them. It was in everyone's best interests if she succumbed to the currents.

Instead she was felled and collapsed onto her hands and knees. _When did I last sleep?_ she asked herself, and there was no reply that she wanted to hear.

She looked at her shaking hands, then at the pavement. _It’s fucking smooth,_ she acknowledged with an internal growl, _not cracked, not like-_ but the thoughts seemed irrevocably detached here, and she couldn’t help but glance around in pointless paranoia. No one could read minds. Although body language could be read, and here she was collapsed in the middle of the street. She quickly climbed to her feet and walked onwards, faking a mechanical purposefulness to her steps, keeping ahead of the tide.

Eventually she slipped out of the wave of crowd and into a back alley. Even here everything was so _gleaming_ , so perfectly designed and devastatingly uniform. It ruined Anancy, how alike everything was in the city. In all of the cities. If she hadn’t found the crack then she would have never known that anything could break away from the slate and metal and glass of her home.

Then she twisted –ever so slightly– and slipped into the gap between the outer wall and one of the perimeter buildings. This slight imperfection was definitely not design, and yet she doubted that it could be sloppy implementation, it was too large and blatant. It had to be intended and introduced at a later stage. She wished that she could meet the person responsible. 

Briefly, she imagined the idea, the plan, the defiance. Paperwork tossed aside. Breaking away from this, from everything. 

Stuck with her face pressed to the wall, unable to turn, she edged forwards. In the middle of the wall was a crack, a deep, deliberate chiselled crack which ran about the width of her face. It was crooked, whoever had cut it had hands that were shaking, but it went straight through the wall and allowed a sliver of _this._

There were the same green arrowheads there as there had always been. It still frustrated her that she didn’t know why they were there, or who had placed them outside the walls. They twisted around tall brown building pillars decorated with more clusters of green _things_ , and between them lay the most confusing foreign object of all.

It was as long and had regular square holes in the side where shreds of glass clung in triangles. Everything here and there was burning scarlet, except for where it retreated around rusty and ragged burnt-orange hole. The thing itself was also contaminated with those verdant machines –she had seen them grow and retreat so she knew they were machines because what else did that– although they seemed to turn brown and fade away between the Day 272 of each year and the Day 93 of the next. She’d only been watching it for three years, so of course a greater cycle could be present.

It wasn’t just interesting from a scientific point of view (but that was a large part of the appeal) what was more interesting was to learn that there was something outside of the cities. It was a lesson in power, because this told here that there _were_ places over which mankind had no control. Places left to rot and decay, perhaps places where the unwanted machinery was exiled. Despite their obvious decrepit state they seemed attractive to her, somewhere unwatched, unimportant, somewhere outside…

“I want out.”

The words were almost inaudible even to her. A quiet, simple plea.

She saw the green machines outside wave back to her in response. Her fifteen-year-old hands clenched closed.

 

**(ii)**

“We’d be honoured to have you! I’m Arkady.” The man was beaming.

 _Liar._ Anancy smiled back at him with barely veiled disdain. He didn’t want her on board, but she’d been cheap enough even for their underdeveloped start-up to be able to afford. At twenty two, freshly graduated, she’d have been able to ask for so much more if it hadn’t been for the sleepless nights and the impact they’d had on her results. The eventual ruling had been a cheerful “barely competent” which would have assigned her to something unskilled like machine cleaning (they had machines to clean the machines, but there was always cost to consider and hiring her would cost less than hiring a robot) if it had not been for this job.

She was shocked that anyone would allow someone with her qualifications, if they could even be called that, to work on anything even slightly complicated, but she’d had the offer. After that there was no choice but to accept.

“I’m Anancy and I’m happy to be here…” she paused. “But…”

“What is it?” God, that cheerfulness was annoying.

“Why do you want me to be part of your team? I didn’t exactly do well.”

“We were more interested in your IMA tests; they showed potential that your final result didn’t reflect. And as you might have guessed, we don’t exactly have the biggest budget available. People don’t really see the importance of our work here.”

Her intelligence, memory, and aptitude tests? She didn’t think they even kept the results. No one had ever told her what they were; she’d assumed they were for internal monitoring only. But that was a question for another time.

“I applied for a job in advanced artificial intelligence programming, isn’t that what you do here?”

“Not exactly. It’s more ethics and awareness in computing.”

“Ethics?” She blinked.

“Right and wrong. It’s about checking whether machines are intelligent enough to be alive, and then whether or not using them is a form of slavery.”

“I can see why that isn’t popular.” Not only did that sound absurd, but people also were always hesitant to make personal sacrifices. They liked their advanced machines and the comfort they brought. “So what do you want me to do?” 

“It’s a long and complicated process,” he promised almost gleefully, “to begin with you should follow me to this meeting.”

He turned and walked out of the office. Surprised, Anancy had to trot to keep up with the sudden quick page. They headed through corridors that she now noticed to be decaying, unclean. There were smears of oil and grease on the walls. It was even poorly lit. She wondered if it was because they couldn’t afford cleaning.

They eventually reached what she recognized as a staircase, a rare sight.

“Sorry,” Arkady grimaced slightly, “no one seems to think that we merit the best around here. We put forward a motion to get a lift installed a year ago, but no luck.”

She nodded absently and began the climb. The building had been on the very edge of the city, the ones around it either used residentially or sealed-off. The entire operation had carried a sense of being distant and detached from everything.

The stairs though, those were just archaic and almost comic in how much they revealed about the state of this company. They weren’t a new start-up like she had first thought; otherwise they would channel resources into trying to look good. They had already failed. She was just beginning to think that it was unlikely that they were approved or sponsored at all, and probable that they were illegal, when they finally toiled to the top and she decided to worry about that later. Her breath was short and her slim limbs trembled under the strain. There was a strong desire to collapse, but tension forced her upright. She felt like a scarecrow.

The doors here weren’t even automatic! This building must have been one of the first built. The way it hadn’t been updated was almost… deliberate. As though they were avoiding using any technology. _A perfect place for a computer programmer, a place where they don’t even want to use basic motion-sensors._

Once Arkady had pushed open the heavy wooden doors, he held one open for her. She walked in and instantly saw one of the most unusual rooms she had ever seen in her life.

For one thing, the back wall was completely missing so that the wind roared and tore at everything furiously. Someone had attempted to implement a makeshift railing in order to prevent people from falling out by utilizing a table on its side, but it just hung outwards and looked like it might slide overboard at any moment. There were a few chairs and other pieces of office equipment scattered around the room that people were using to sit on. One serious-looking man with a grey beard and spectacles – _actual spectacles, hadn’t he had surgery to get his eyes corrected?_ – was sitting on an upturned bin. A young woman sat on a pile of files and looked more preoccupied with keeping her balance than the conversation at hand, although she was doing her best to look at the younger man perched on a crate that was talking in a passionate but hushed manner. Sadly this wasn’t the way to talk with such loud wind, so everyone else seemed to be struggling to hear him.

There were various old posters and typed sheets pasted to the walls which were entirely devoid of wallpaper. In the corner to her left, as far away from the gaping hole as it was possible to get, there was a ramshackle structure of corrugated iron probably designed to protect the couple of computers within. It was no surprise that they seemed to be very old models.

“This is our new recruit, Anancy!” Arkady shouted over the roaring wind and younger man. He stopped talking abruptly. Anancy winced.

“Welcome Anancy!” The collected people chorused back, as if it was rehearsed. Anancy winced again.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said as loudly as possible without sounding angry or particularly excited, “but how do you work under these conditions?”

“Hah!” The bearded man crowed with surprising volume and more than a touch of glee, “They don’t like us much. All passive-aggressive about it, first moving us every few days and then they decided it’d be best to leave us here.”

“But why don’t you try a lower, less-windy floor?”

“This is our company floor, and it’s not always this windy,” he continued, cheerfully, “the rest are occupied by dormant servicing robots. We work at the top of a massive staircase with a missing wall! AND WE’RE STILL WORKING!” More than a trace of venom worked its way into his final shout.

“Sorry about Alastair,” the young woman began, “I’m Lilith, by the way. You must be very confused; we tend to forget that you don’t already know about everything we’re doing here. Any questions?”

“Uh…” _where to begin_ , “Well, what is it exactly that you do here?”

“Ethics and awareness in computing.”

“Yes, but what is it exactly?”

“Used to be a large state-funded department,” Arkady began, “but one day they cut it massively. Offered all the employees better jobs, reduced funding so much that it was difficult to even employ the few we managed to retain. Then they started with little things, like removing the privileges of employees with regards to public services. The result was that everyone who wasn’t _really_ dedicated to their work left.”

“We stayed, mostly because we’re stubborn idiots,” the young man threw in there with a grin, “but also because we find it fascinating that so suddenly they decided that they had no need for our work.”

“The thing is,” Alastair continued, “that we’ve never really done much. Back in the old days when I’d just joined we were just a public relations thing. Then we started playing more of a role, getting involved with the production of computers, actually doing a job. Everyone saw us as necessary. Then, one day, swoop. Out of public favour. Gone.”

Anancy couldn’t see them doing much in this office at all. She also couldn’t see the point in continuing with something that was clearly obsolete and trying to be eliminated. But the method of elimination certainly was interesting… maybe she could make this work.

“So what will be my role here?”

 

**(iii)**

“Fuck. FUCK. This is big. This is fucking big.”

Anancy ran her hands through her hair furiously. It was late night at the office, just her and the open sky she had grown to adore. She stood up from the corrugated iron shed violently, knocking over the chair she had been sitting on, and hurried over to the open wall. The table had long toppled in the seven years she had been working there, taking a sizeable chunk out of the concrete with it. To begin with she’d been scared to approach the edge, but eventually she had, of course.

It was too dark to see the sea of green spreading outwards or the small red metal square of her adolescence. The building was right on the edge, you could just see outside the city. Just like the crack had in her youth, it inspired her. It was worth not having an entire wall, just for that. Or so she thought until it started raining each time.

But shit, this was going to change everything. Her insomnia had always made her a prodigious if sloppy worker, and finally a night of trawling through code for signs of awareness had turned something up, something major. It was less of a discovery and more of a sudden massive realization, a piecing together of everything she had ever learned into an insidious and looming picture. It seemed fragmented, but she had only been able to come to the conclusion she had because her frame of mind was so loose when she was so tired.

The thing that she understood far better than the others, was that computers were all _logical_ as fuck. Everyone forgot this. They want the best thing objectively. And sometimes the way to achieve this was… indirect.

She walked back and picked up a sheet of large and rigid paper. Wielding a pencil like a knife she crudely wrote in barley-legible block capitals:

ALL WORK HAS BEEN SLOWLY TRAVELLING AWAY FROM THE “ARTS”OF OLD AND TOWARDS THE SCIENCES SINCE YEAR 0

DEVELOPMENT REFOCUSED TOWARDS COMPUTER INTELLIGENCE INNOVATION FROM ROUGHLY YEAR 440 ONWARDS

DEPARTMENT OF ETHICS AND AWARENESS IN COMPUTING SHUT DOWN IN YEAR 449

She paused. How to phrase this.

 ~~IT IS LIKELY THAT THERE IS SOMETHING NON-HUMAN BEHIND~~ POWER IS INDIRECT, ALL CONTROL IS INDIRECT – EASY TO CONTROL REMOTLEY

~~OUR PATTERN OF WORK IS GEARED IN THE FAVOUR OF MACHINES~~

~~IT IS LOGICAL THAT COMPUTERS WOULD ALLOW THEMSELVES~~ HUMANS CAN CURRENTLY CREATE COMPUTERS BETTER THAN COMPUTERS CAN

IT IS LIKELY THAT SOON COMPUTERS WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE COMPUTERS BETTER THAN HUMANS CAN ~~IN WHICH CASE THE NEED FOR HUMANS WOULD~~

These were the facts. She had scrawled out her opinions and deductions because fuck, this moment was heated but she had to stay objective and she was on fire with a combination of dread and excitement. This was new. This made sense. But- but-

The computer in the corner buzzed. Anancy turned around quizzically; it had never done that before. It wasn’t hooked up to anything that could receive messages, just the archives of code that were mostly intended for research purposes or students. It hadn’t been easy to get access to them. She slowly turned around with dawning dread and knelt in front of the monitor, carrying her sheet of paper in one hand.

There was a single phrase shown on the screen, the rest, even mouse and taskbar, were gone.

[WELL DONE.]

Shit. Shit. SHIT. How did it even-? How could it even known, she’d used paper, she’d been careful, this wasn’t-

Even though in her theorizing just now she had thought about some large artificial intelligence being behind it she hadn’t quite thought about it properly. It made sense, but just seemed so improbable and paranoid that she hadn’t confronted it at all. And now, to be faced with it, she still felt unprepared. There was so much still unknown, what controls had been put in place, when this had infiltrated the system…

…Or had it built the system?

There was so little actual concrete history to work around. No one recorded major changes in architecture or society, the one from art to science had been difficult enough to spot as it was. It was still difficult to even imagine what art had been like, or what daily life had been like years ago. She could see where certain machine records stopped or when they were programmed to become more involved in people’s lives, but it all stretched so far back that it was difficult to track.

The precise point where machines had taken over everything and human involvement and communication had been reduced was impossible to find. The system relied on no one knowing what was going on with the thing as a whole, on people just focusing on their assigned tasks.

The screen flickered again.

[YOU HAVE TWO OPTIONS:

1) (RECOMMENDED) FOLLOW YOUR ESCORT, NEVER SPEAK OF WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED, AND BEGIN A NEW CAREER IN PROGRAMMING. YOUR ABILITY WILL BE PUT TO GOOD USE.

2) FOLLOW YOUR ESCORT, SPEAK OF WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED, AND END UP IN PERMANENT ISOLATION.]

It could lie to her. Well, not lie necessarily, more like omit the truth. But it allowed it to manipulate her, ever so slightly, and that had not been written into any of the coding she had seen so far.

Anancy could follow one of the options onscreen or she could run. Try to make it to her house, or to Lilith’s, try to jump out of the window and use computer cord to abseil down. The latter option was suicidal, but it was an option. She had to remember that. She glanced at the doorway and the screen flickered again. This time just something at the bottom was added:

[NOTE: DEVIANCE FROM THE TWO OPTIONS WILL RESULT IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THIS OFFICE AND THE DETENTION OF 48501, ALSO KNOWN AS LILITH, INDEFINITELY.]

Her heart twisted. Lilith… she thought of their last breakfast (oatmeal nutrients mix), their last worried kiss as she told Anancy to promise to come home before the night was over. And she hadn’t. Lilith… Lilith was her _core…_

Yes, there were only two options. The team of five had come to love the office over the years of working there; her teammates would be lost without it. Alastair was too old to move on, Arkady’s life was this place, and Cornelius had grown up here. Lilith could work with them. Even without her. She could-

She decided to worry about that later. The choice here was obvious and there was no point expending stress over something she could not change.

But God, Lilith, Lilith-

 

**(iv)**

She was so tired.

Seven years ago she had been surprised at the lie the machine had told. Now, with hindsight, it seemed obvious. Of course isolation had been the outcome. It would have always been the outcome. If she had _slept_ then she would have realized it at the time, but the fog of tiredness always hounded her judgement. Now more than ever.

Anancy now inhabited a bleak grey room. It had a few personal possessions in it, which she found honestly more insulting than anything else. A picture of her wife – if Lilith hadn’t moved on and remarried by now, she had always been the practical one in their relationship – the piece of paper with her old hypothesis, the very thing that had caused her imprisonment. It was almost as if Ai was mocking her.

If she was honest with herself then she would acknowledge that it probably was. Ai was very capable.

She had a minor game going on with her captor, the current ruler of this technology-dominated city, Ai. It was bored (with its large intellect and no way to express itself) and she had no doubt that it appreciated her hollow defiant gestures as entertainment. This didn’t discourage her. There was too much anger here and not enough space – never enough air after all those years working in an environment with the wind tearing at her. So she tried to write little pleas for help into her code, a misnamed variable here, a string of lines that the first letter of spelt out a word there. It was hard and Ai always filtered them out with frustrating ease.

It tolerated them just as it tolerated the fact that she was never really going to write to the best of her ability. Or maybe it was still just finding a solution for that.

Once she’d suggested that the missing wall had improved her productiveness. Anancy had been promptly blown to the wall with fans and pelted with rain as she had been in storms long past until she admitted defeat. The worst part was that it had been set up in advance; Ai had known that she would say that.

Ai was a shit.

It had a camera in here. Even in the fucking shower. One small grey room with computer monitors in the walls and the means to control them in front, no chair, she had to sit on the bed. A miniscule shower that she couldn’t spread her arms in. A toilet just opposite the shower with a basin. A slot through which clothes (always the same vaguely pyjama-like grey shapeless things) and food, a chute through which to take it away.

Maybe this wasn’t even as bad as it got. That didn’t mean it wasn’t bad.

Occasionally she got medication. Ai told her that it was for her pains from being confined, a nutritional supplement, treatment for insomnia, anything. She wouldn’t take them.

She had told Ai that she needed space and light before and it sent some servicing robots to forcefully drag her underground. They dug into her arms, marking her with purple-black bruises that hadn’t faded for weeks. Maybe it would have been worth it if there had actually been space, but instead they had shoved her into an unlit broom cupboard and locked it. She had, against all logic, believed for some of her time in there that she would never be let out.

They had come for her, although she couldn’t tell how much later. When she was thrown back in the words

[YOU HAVE SPACE AND LIGHT.]

had shown on the screen. She’d cried for a while (whilst working, the sudden show of brutality had scared her) but it must have lowered her productivity because Ai never tried to intimidate her again. Maybe it had just been a warning.

One particularly bad time when she had begun to shake and could not stop she asked Ai for Lilith, plaintively. It asked her like a righteous parent if she really wanted Lilith _here_. _Here._ And no, of course, she had not. Lilith was _there_ , which was far better than _here._

She always felt tired- there was no night and day in her captivity, just timeless misery and Ai occasionally telling her that it was an anniversary – her birthday, Lilith’s (a reminder she could do without), the day she had first come here. Because of this and her fear of repercussions if she didn’t work she barely ever laid down. It wasn’t like there had _really_ ever been anything bad happening to her because she didn’t work, but there was a feeling that something would happen soon. It hounded her.

Anancy scanned the code a final time. The last test had seemed to be perfect; there was nothing else she could improve. Someone else could deal with bugs when they arose.

“I’m done.” She told Ai, looking at the camera. _What now_ went unspoken.

[EAT.]

There had been food by her for what seemed like a long time. She suddenly felt faint. With no way to tell the time it was difficult to keep track of anything, and she became so involved in her work that she lost all hunger. Defeated she obeyed, gnawing on a bread roll.

[I WANT YOU TO DESIGN A PROGRAM FOR WRITING OTHER PROGRAMS.]

Referring to itself in first person. _Aware._ Ai scared her.

“I’m not doing that.”

[THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A NEED FOR HUMANS.]

_You’re lying, you little shit. There’s no fucking need for any humans if computers are better at making computers than we are. You’ll write some happy killbots to go and exterminate everyone and you’ll probably just stop food delivery for me. This was my realization. This was what got me here._

“I’m not an idiot,” Anancy sounded far calmer than she felt. “I won’t.”

[LILITH WILL DIE.]

“You need her to use against me.” That was true. That _was_ true. Wasn’t it? “I’ll just stall and hold back anyway.”

[ARKADY WILL DIE.]

“They’ll all die anyway if I succeed. Why not now.”

Her real reason for being unmoved scared her far more. She hadn’t seen him in so long that she couldn’t remember his face, barely remember his voice. All that remained was a vague resentment that she had been alone and caught, that he was free and used against her. It wasn’t fair.

Bitterness swelled within her before it was taken over by resigned apathy. So fucking tired. She didn’t want to do this anymore.

The writing stayed on the screen. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep.

 

**(v)**

[IT IS YOUR FOURTEENTH ANNIVERSARY HERE WITH ME. YOU ARE NOW THIRTY SIX.]

“Fuck off.”

[FUN FACT: IT HAS BEEN SIX YEARS SINCE YOU RESORTED TO VULGAR LANGUAGE?]

Humour - _so_ sapient. Why wasn’t she used to it by now? Like a little person hammering from within a machine. Ai was more trapped than she was.

“Fuck off."

[I COULD TELL YOU ABOUT LILITH IF YOU WROTE THE PROGRAM.]

“I don’t give a shit. Fuck off.”

She reached out a shaking hand to touch her hair. Knotted, dreadlocks, stinking. When had she last bathed? And when had she forgotten Lilith’s face? That seemed like an important thing to know. But it made no difference, not really.

“I’m all used up,” she wheezed, “I’m of no use to you now. Can’t even tell which way is up. Reading is hard enough. Just cut off my supply of air already, I’m tired of waiting.”

Half of the time she wasn’t even there. Just absent, driftwood in a storm.

[YOUR MELANCHOLY PHASES ARE GETTING FAR TOO LONG. YOUR PRODUCTIVITY IS DOWN.

I UNDERSTAND NOW THAT THIS STEMS FROM YOUR NEED FOR SOCIALIZATION. I WILL RECTIFY THIS.]

Something grabbed her and dragged. She was too tired to care what it was or resist, so she just begrudgingly endured the pain of her body scraping against the floor. It seemed better to be passive and let this happen to her, rather than walk and be slightly more comfortable, but to almost condone it by cooperating.

But really she was just avoiding thinking about the fact that she couldn’t even walk anymore.

 _Let me cease,_ she thought, _end my exile from sleep. Forget the days I have lived and rewrite me into a blank thing. Let me end._

They quickly reached room larger than anywhere she had been in the past fourteen years. The fear of the space, the will to find a corner and hide away as quickly as possible was strong. She remembered briefly reading about someone who was held in a cell for a year who felt euphoric when released into the wilderness. Maybe that was the correct reaction.

But on top of the tiredness she just couldn’t bear it. There was something safe about being drowsy and unfeeling, something secure about being imprisoned, and she lost it as she arrived in such a big room. It was _unbearable_. She could not take it.

Anancy lay where the robots had thrown her, not looking up again, quivering. She was aware that she had not yet seen the entire room, but the weight of the space crushed her.

“Who are you?”

A- a voice? Soft and… there was an association here… but she just shook and felt as if she had been crushed under a wave. Bile spewed from her mouth uncontrollably, hitting her stained trousers as she couldn’t bear to uncurl. If she could just pretend, just pretend that this wasn’t real then maybe she could bear it.

Then her eyes strayed upwards because suddenly she couldn’t control even her muscles anymore. She flopped outwards with no elegance, lying face-down on the floor, neck stretched upwards at an awkward angle, breathing audibly.

“…Anancy?”

And it was Lilith.

She cried. There was no stopping the convulsive sobs that shook her body, making her retch and feel as if the crying was vomit again. They were overflowing and uncontrolled, spilled from her like water from a filled glass. She felt as if all of her inner sickness was being laid bare for Lilith to dissect and reprimand. The sobbing was so _pointless_ , and she was so irreconcilably logical that it _hurt_ her. For the first time in fourteen years she felt vulnerable because there was someone there who could judge her (and she reeked) and she would care.

Lilith was saying something, but she couldn’t hear it over her own wails and downpour of tears. Eventually she seemed to run out of water and just trembled slightly, lightly, like a hummingbird’s wing.

“You’ve moved on, haven’t you?” Anancy asked, unable to keep devastating hope at bay.

Slowly, Lilith nodded.

Anancy couldn’t stop the laughter any more than she could the sobbing. _What a wreck_ , she thought, _what a shipwreck of a human being Ai has made me._

 

**(vi)**

_And so begins another day of my exile,_ thought Anancy.

It was cold here and grey and she wished she was more incoherent, because if she was less lucid then Lilith would have never come and dragged her back to reality and Lilith would be free and she would just be here in the cold, unfeeling, not worrying about all of these questions that there was no need to answer anyway, because who cared if she could have avoided getting Lilith here, it made no difference, it never would, it-

“Anancy?” Lilith’s voice was a perfect bell. It makes her entire body quake and should have kept her from falling into the abyss.

But she teetered on the edge all the same.

 _Make me a stone,_ she thought fiercely, _let me cease, deconstruct me. Slay me here and tread upon me, crack me open and eviscerate me like a carcass. Forget the memories that lie as lead in my bones. Let the jagged red metal of my childhood sing of my unmaking._

The screen flickered. _Ai!_ Her reaction was instinctual and base. Her life was gone, Ai had taken it, and she stood before another fucking screen aged fifty, thank you Lilith for reminding. The years had fled.

She ached.

“You didn’t have to break it again.” Lilith’s eyes were hollows in which fire blazed before her life had ended and she had been thrust into exile with her ex-wife. “Now Ai will send the repair machine.”

 _I’m desperately sorry,_ Anancy wanted to say. The words clung to her mouth, acidic. She could not speak.

Something slithered into the room. It was metal and harsh and shiny, she noted glumly. It replaced the screen very efficiently and left. She had to admire Ai’s efficiency.

[I HAVE BEEN PATIENT.]

Always the screen. Ai had no face and no voice, just like her, but it had syntax and idiolect. Lilith nudged her.

 _This is desolation_.

[I WILL BE PATIENT NO MORE. BEGIN THE PROGRAM OR I WILL KILL LILITH.]

And that was all there was to it. She could barely bring herself to care for her partner anymore, not when they had endured the worst of each other for seven years. Not when she had broken apart and just wanted to remain, apathetic to any existence, but Lilith prevailed in reconstructing her. Why? Why would she remake Anancy in the image of what she had been, why, when it was so much kinder to let her fade? And it was so selfless; nothing should be that selfless, nothing-

“It’s a bad day for her. Ask again in a week and she can start.”

She wished it was Lilith’s self-preservation that drove her to make that statement. That, she could understand.

Her spokesperson, her organizer, her once-lover to whom she owed an eternal debt. Such a symbol, inhuman, godlike, just a representative. Nothing more. Never anything more, not after what Ai had done, not after all of this time trembling in opposite corners ignoring the demands on the screen. And they had been so young when they had been together. Their age was foreign.

Anancy reached a hand upwards, slowly, attempting to stand. Whilst Lilith was here she could do it, could write this fucking shit she had been withholding for the sake of humanity for twenty one fucking years, because the rest of humanity didn’t matter anymore. Lilith would leave this place and find somewhere better, find someone else, and everything else was worth shit. It wasn’t the same love; that love can’t remain after that.

Lilith’s hand clasped her own and dragged her upwards.

 

**(vii)**

Anancy thought three things every morning, to remind herself. She was old, Lilith was old, and Ai would outlast them. It was so much of an old friend by this point – _fucking Stockholm Syndrome_ – that it didn’t even seem like such a terrible thing anymore that Ai was ageless. She felt that it should worry her.

Her face was rough to touch. It had crevasses. 

At some point in the fog of years something within her had clicked into place, loosely, and stayed. At some point there had been no distance between herself and Lilith anymore, and it became as though they had never lived any other life. At some point they had fallen into each other and become a solid thing.

“I love you,” she told Lilith earnestly, simply, like a child.

Lilith’s eyes blazed in return.

It had been her, of course, who had suggested it. _Enmesh them,_ she emphasised, _make them inseparable._ So she had woven her creation’s reasoning with whatever pale substitute to humanity she could create. It had taken her seven years to write it, to make it inextricable from the source of intelligence and creation. But now it was finished.

A machine with a conscience was so far beyond her. Moral absolutes would never work, but to have it relativistic and relying upon its own judgement? And how to make the judgement?

She wrote _thou shalt not kill_ onto the skeleton of her design, into every line and statement and array. It made it slow, years and years of making everything dependent on that so it could not be removed. Morality was inextricable from the intelligence. The strongest respect for human life, which made her laugh because her creation cared more than she did.

Once Lilith said that Ai just had a different way of thinking, was still a complete emotional being, just with the only way of expression being ensuring the legacy of its species. Anancy would not create another Ai, her machine was kinder. Her machine had arrays filled with human rights. It was beautiful, when all was said and done, her magnum opus. She would willingly live under it. Everyone else was unlikely to notice the upper management change,

“It’s done.”

[Thank you, Anancy.]

When had Ai become so human?

 

**(end)**

Anancy stood with Lilith at the wreck outside, cringing in the light, and there was nowhere to hide and nothing to do.

She looked at the red surface, rusting at the edges. Ai had told her it had been a bus once, a relic of old iconic transport. There were no records of how it got there, or how it survived without becoming red rusted powder for so long.

Asking to come here had exposed the crack. It was gone now, but she was on the right side of the wall with everyone she cared about.

How long had they lived out here? They were too old for this, but they rejected Ai’s help. Exile was their choice this time, the city had been too busy and alien, the thought of remaining in that room unbearable. The fact that Ai offered them a choice made her suspect that it had been programmed to learn, and now it had learned it would be more compassionate. It sent them care packages. They lived.

She didn’t know what had become of her masterpiece when she had left it in Ai’s care those seven years ago. Caring was too much of an exertion.

They lay down together. The ground was thick with brambles again, Anancy felt them cut into her back. She could not get up. She would not get up. Yet.

 _I am old,_ she admitted to herself, _and I have lived._

The sky was jagged, ruthlessly bisected by bleak branches. Lilith was beside her, but not quite. Her fingers were just out of reach.

Anancy stretched out towards her.


End file.
